HARTFORD -- Bullet casings should be etched with identification numbers, and buyers and sellers of firearms in Connecticut should submit to mental health screening, the Governor's Sandy Hook Advisory Commission recommended Friday.

Advocates for gun rights were immediately critical of the proposals, charging that marking shells would not prevent a Newtown-style murder spree and suicide, and further screening could violate constitutional protections for gun owners.

Bob Crook, executive director of the Coalition of Connecticut Sportsmen and a lobbyist for the firearms industry, said etching on bullet shells has been rejected several times by state lawmakers.

"It doesn't make sense," Crook said in a phone interview. "All it takes is a file to get rid of those markings. It doesn't do anything to prevent criminals from having guns that don't have markings. People can go to a shooting range, collect some empty cartridges with microstamping and scatter them around a crime scene."

It was the first meeting since February of the commission, which is charged with recommending changes in law or procedure to Gov. Dannel P. Malloy. Frustrated panel members said that more than a year and a half after the massacre killed 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School, shootings continue both in the state and around the nation.

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Other Sandy Hook Advisory Committee recommendations include:* new protocols for law enforcement officials to respond to other jurisdictions under a joint dispatching system.* a new statewide regional incident team.* routine action review after major criminal events.

"There has to be some way to screen somebody," said Bernard Sullivan, a former Hartford police chief who led a subcommittee on firearm reforms. He said alcoholism and mental health problems that are not currently part of the state's review process should somehow become part of a revamped, more-stringent licensing procedure.

"I think we need to go a step further," Sullivan said. "There has to be some method to keep guns out of the hands of people who shouldn't have them."

Norwalk Fire Chief Denis McCarthy, another member of the subcommittee, said amid the national discussion on gun violence, very little progress has been made since the Newtown tragedy.

"I'm just at a point of frustration and concern that as we move toward completion of our charge that we haven't made a difference and this won't make a difference, that it will be addressing the problem from the margins," McCarthy said. "I'm really concerned that when the report is written and published it will not have changed the flow of what we seem to be dealing with in this country."

McCarthy said the panel was sensitive to the rights of gun owners at a time when gun violence "is an ongoing epidemic."

Hamden Mayor Scott Jackson, chairman of the 16-member commission, said a mere report will have a tough time of stopping the cultural trend of violence.

"What I think each one of us who has spent so much time on this is attempting to do is to add another voice of credibility, so the crescendo emerges that says we must take a look at our cultural underpinnings, because that may very well be the root of this series of tragedies and disasters that has befallen this nation for many years now," Jackson said.

Currently, those who have been institutionalized, convicted felons and those with active restraining orders are prohibited from possessing firearms. Licensing law, however, includes the requirement that gun owners must be "suitable." They can be denied pistol permits if they are no longer deemed suitable, by making criminal threats, for instance, or being charged with cruelty to animals.

Crook, the gun industry spokesman, stressed that sellers and purchasers of firearms in Connecticut are currently required to pass federal criminal checks, even if the firearms are sold at gun shows or on the Internet. People who have been institutionalized for mental health reasons are prohibited from buying guns in Connecticut.

Expanding reasons for denying or taking away gun permits could threaten Second Amendment rights to possess firearms, he warned.